GERMANY - After rioting in the eastern-German city of Chemnitz on August 26 and 27 by neo-Nazis and other forces of the extreme right, many observers are questioning whether far-right sympathies among the security forces allowed things to get out of hand.
The riots broke out in the wake of a fatal stabbing in the city (with a population of about 250,000, it’s the third-largest in Saxony, after Leipzig and Dresden) in the early morning hours of Sunday, August 26, during a brawl at the tail end of a street festival. Two men, an Iraqi and a Syrian, were arrested, and a news website, Tag24, reported that the victim, a German-Cuban man, had been killed while trying to protect a woman from sexual assault.
More reputable German media have said that the Tag24 report was false. The details of the incident remain unclear, but the fact of the stabbing and the arrest of two foreigners provided a pretext for the right-wing violence that followed.
The way these riots developed illustrates how right-wing groups and parties in Germany interact, and how they are creating, all together, a sharp rightward shift in the country’s political climate. The first group on the scene was organized by the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which is today the largest opposition party in the German parliament.